1

Death by Water: The Rise and

Fall of Los Saltos del Guairá.

The fall of the waters, whose noise can be heard miles off, is most deafening,

and like the roar of thunder; the ground in the neighbourhood also trembles as

if a volcano was burning the inside of the earth. Of its sort the falls of Guayra

has no rival, and of it can be said that even the far-famed Niagara must do it

homage as a King of Nature. The famous waterfalls of the world known up to

the present time would be considered pigmys by the side of the Parana giant.1

“The Waterfall of Guayra,” Manchester Courier (25 April 1876)

Until 1982, los Saltos del Guairá, known in English as the Guayra Falls, and

in Portuguese as Sete Quedas (Seven Falls), on the Brazil-Paraguay border

were the most powerful waterfalls on earth, surpassing the other cataracts of

the world in volume and offering a dramatic visual and aural spectacle.

However, in October 1982, these immense falls vanished, submerged in two

weeks by rising river levels extending behind the vast reservoir created by the

massive Itaipú Dam (Fig. 1). Itaipú, located 170 kilometres south of the falls

on the Paraná, and jointly-run by Brazil and Paraguay, was the product of a

Brazilian drive for energy which saw the two countries develop a project

subsequently voted one of the seven wonders of the modern world in 1994

2

by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Providing close to a fifth of

Brazil’s electrical energy needs, and almost all of Paraguay’s, Itaipú became

the largest hydroelectric project in the world, achieving a new world-record in

2016 with production of 103,098,366 MWh.

Itaipú has been the subject of numerous scholarly studies, a National

Geographic documentary, as well as inspiring an eponymous symphonic cantata

by US composer Philip Glass.2 It also plays a prominent role in Paraguayan

politics in the context of the country’s “hydroelectric sovereignty” following

the Itaipú Treaty (1973), which dictated terms regarding the export of

Paraguay’s surplus energy that were highly advantageous to Brazil.3 A major

tourist attraction in Paraguay, and a source of pride as a symbol of the

country’s modernity, Itaipú, however, ensured the disappearance of los Saltos

del Guairá, an extensive natural formation (Fig. 2) that held an important

place in Paraguayan history and the literature of landscape in Latin America.

The disappearance of the falls has been described as “the greatest loss of the

planet’s scenic heritage” resulting from dam construction, but despite this,

with the exception of a short entry in R. Andrew Nickson’s Historical

Dictionary of Paraguay (2015), no study of los Saltos del Guairá in the literature

and history of Latin America has yet appeared in English.4 While in

Portuguese, a number of studies have focused on the Brazilian contexts of

the inundation of Sete Quedas and the political, social and environmental

consequences of the construction of Itaipú, in both Spanish and English

information on the rich history of the falls lies across Jesuit histories,

travellers’ accounts and Paraguayan archives.5 The end of the falls went

unreported in international media in 1982, and outside of Paraguay and

3

Brazil, knowledge of the former existence of los Saltos del Guairá remains

scant. Their history, and the circumstances leading to their disappearance,

therefore, represents an unexamined moment in the environmental history of

Latin America, a lacuna in the record of modernity’s transformation of

natural landscapes. If, as Shawn William Miller suggests, the “work of

environmental history is to recover, in a sense, what is lost, and to make it

dear to our historical consciousness,” then this article aims to uncover the

history of one of the most impressive vanished places of the earth by

exploring the literary, cultural and political contexts of los Saltos del Guairá.6

The history of this Paraguayan and Brazilian exchange between

geography and the poetic and scientific imaginations sheds important light on

evolving attitudes to the environment in an especially dramatic context.

Responses to the monumental falls by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth

century, scientifically-minded travellers and explorers in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, through to politicians and engineers in the twentieth

century chart a journey from trepidation before the natural sublime to an

emerging awareness of the possibility of material intervention and control

over nature. However, while the history of los Saltos del Guairá documents

the human experience of nature, its fate also records nature’s experience of

people, notably the environmental consequences of the economic

development of nation states in the twentieth century. From the beginning,

los Saltos del Guairá took up a prominent role in the imaginaries of Jesuit

historians and travellers, later becoming, in the 19th and 20th centuries,

central to the political and material aspirations of both Paraguay and Brazil.

Whereas the falls, in their physicality, were long-conceived as fundamental to

4

Jesuit, and later national histories, the imperatives of modern economic

transformation suddenly became founded on their disappearance.

This study, therefore, explores in detail how people came to “to

understand, define and ultimately transform” one of the most remarkable

natural sights in South America.7 Human intervention in the environment

perhaps offers no worse example than the disappearance of los Saltos del

Guairá, and the loss takes on particular significance in the context of ongoing

dam construction in both Latin America, especially in Brazil, and around the

world. It also highlights how environmental wounds can be concealed,

especially where superlatives formerly employed to define the world’s most

powerful falls have been co-opted to describe the world’s most powerful

dam. In this respect, the changing rhetoric of writers who evoked a singular

landscape also bears witness to an exemplary feature of the transformation of

the modern world, whereby nature which “had previously been known only

as an elemental force . . . now became an invisible but efficient power with

unsuspected possibilities.”8 Travellers contributed to a fascination with the

various lost, isolated, but potentially recoverable worlds of South America,

but this gradually ceded to a language that prophesied the harnessing of the

unchained power of the Paraná into the channelled production of electrical

units; ensuring the sudden, definitive end of los Saltos del Guairá.

Between History and Legend: Early Writings on the Falls

Situated at 24° 02΄S 54° 16΄W, where the world’s eighth largest river

narrowed precipitously from a width of over four kilometres into a gorge

comprised of a series of cascading channels, los Saltos del Guairá “thundered

5

over 18 separate cataracts each more than 30 metres high,” seven of which

constituted the major falls referred to in the name Sete Quedas.9 In Among the

Waterfalls of the World (1935), an illustrated survey of the world’s then major

cataracts (Fig. 3), Edward C. Rashleigh outlined the “immense unchained

power which Guayra conveys,” divulging that “the average mean flow is not

merely far more than double that of the mean of Niagara, but exceeds the

combined mean volumes of Niagara, Paulo Affonso, the Iguazu Falls, the

Grand Falls of Labrador, the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi and Kaieteur

rolled into one!”10

Of the falls listed by Rashleigh, Guayra, Labrador (Canada), and Paulo

Affonso (Brazil), have all now vanished; submerged, controlled, or dried up

in the drive for renewable energy. However, before the development of

hydroelectric projects in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a

visit to these waterfalls proved irresistible to adventurous travellers, for

whom “the esthetic pleasure of the sight singlehandedly constitute[ed] the

value and significance of the journey.”11 In the 1870s, Scottish writer R. B

Cunninghame Graham travelled through Latin America, and in A Vanished

Arcadia (1901), a history of the Jesuit missions, he reflected on the falls of

Guayra and their isolation, drawing attention to their enigmatic reputation,

inaccessibility, and the sparse number of accounts of previous travellers:

“Few European travellers even today have visited the great cataract known as

El Salto de Guayra, or in Portuguese as Sete Quedas. . . . Situated as it is in

the midst of almost impenetrable forests, it has not even now been properly

placed upon the map.”12 For Graham, a Socialist who viewed Jesuit Paraguay

in a Utopian light, the falls offered an imposing entrance to a country

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frequently placed beyond the stream of modernity, either through the

dictatorship of Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1766-1840), who

closed Paraguay to the world in the early nineteenth century, or by the geo-

political designs of Brazil and Argentina, both of which acquired Paraguayan

territory after inflicting a devastating defeat on the country in the War of the

Triple Alliance (1864-70). Still remote and resisting modernity, the falls stood

as a portal to the past: “Buried in the primeval forests, forgotten by the world

. . . the giant cataract is a lost wonder of the world.”13

While the forgotten nature of the falls appealed to Cunninghame

Graham, it was their distinctly unforgettable nature that characterized their

important place in the earliest descriptions of Latin America. Spanish cleric

and explorer Martín del Barco Centenera’s (1535-c.1602) poem Argentina y

conquista del Río de la Plata (Lisbon, 1602) prefigured Jesuit accounts of the

wonders of the continent, surveying the territory of the Paraná and offering

what would become a recurring trope in Baroque estimations of the excess of

the natural landscape of the New World: “The falls /My hand is trembling,

and I flee from them / The most horrible and dreadful thing / In all the wide

and wonderful Paraná.”14 In the work of colonial administrator Ruy Díaz de

Guzman (1559-1629), whose Historia Argentina (1612) offered an outline of

the early conquest of the region, the author wrote of “that strange cataract,

which I take to be the greatest wonder of nature in existence.”15 In such

accounts, the falls embody a natural formation that inspires the “discourse of

the marvellous” which Stephen Greenblatt has labelled as “the central figure

in the initial response to the New World.”16 Describing the Paraná’s violent

progress through the channels of the falls, Guzman observed that “no human

7

eye or brain can look on it without fainting and losing consciousness. The

noise of the falls is heard eight leagues away, and at six leagues off you can

see the steam and mist from the falling water rising like white cloud.”17

Elaborating on such descriptions, Jesuit Nicholas del Techo (1611-80)

echoed the rhetoric of amazement, casting the falls as the pinnacle of Latin

American natural majesty. In “The Wonderful Precipice of Guayra,” part of

his History of the Provinces of Paraguay, Tucuman, Rio de La Plata, Parana, Guaira,

and Urvaica (1704 [1673]), Del Techo observed that “Very many fabulous

stories have been made concerning this Precipice . . . and I know not

whether there be any thing in the world more wonderful of that kind; at least

in America, there is nothing more dreadful, or more spoken of.”18 These

accounts echo descriptions of natural phenomena elsewhere in the Americas,

including early descriptions of Niagara Falls, which spoke of a “frightful

abyss” with “a sound more terrible than that of thunder,” and such language

“stimulated in Europeans the macabre vision of the New World . . . [where] a

gargantuan cataract foamed and roared in the unknown interior of the

continent.”19 Common to accounts of both Niagara and los Saltos del Guairá

is a spectacular natural backdrop to the work of spiritual salvation, with Jesuit

natural histories of South America beholding both wonder and terror to

afford “a glimpse into the perturbing side of the Guaraní Eden.”20

It is from Jesuit accounts, particularly Antonio Ruiz de Montoya’s

(1585-1652) Conquista espiritual hecha por los religiosos de la Compañía de Jesús en las

provincias del Paraguay, Paraná, Uruguay y Tape (1639), that the association of

waterfalls with Jesuit missions originates, something exploited in the film The

Mission (1986), shot at Iguazu Falls following the inundation of Guayra in

8

1982, and inspired by passages from Montoya and Del Techo in Philip

Caraman’s The Lost Paradise (1977). After the establishment of the initial

mission settlements on the Río Paranapanema in 1610, above Guayra Falls,

Montoya fled the incursions of Brazilian slave traders (Paulistas) in 1631 and

moved with thousands of Guarani down the Paraná to the territory that

forms modern-day Paraguay. This exodus, achieved at the cost of sickness,

hunger, and death, involved circumnavigating “the great cataract of the

Paraná . . . [which] was counted on by the Jesuits as an effective safety-line

between their intended settlements and the ravaging Paulistas.”21 Described

by Montoya as “one of the wonders of the world,” the prominence of los

Saltos del Guairá as the major geological feature of the region is also

evidenced by its appearance in contemporary Jesuit cartography.22 In

Giovanni Petroschi’s Paraquariae Provinciae (1732), the falls feature imposingly

as the “salto grande,” or Great Fall, mapped as a semi-ledgendary gateway to

Jesuit Paraquaria. The connection in Jesuit texts between landscape and the

narrative of the mission settlements initiated a historiographical process that

identified the contours of later Paraguayan territory with los Saltos del

Guairá. For instance, in 1965, during the stand-off between Brazil and

Paraguay over the falls and potential hydroelectric development, Paraguayan

historian Efraím Cardozo observed that “to speak of los Saltos del Guairá

and to speak of Paraguay is to speak of one and the same thing.”23

In the history of scientific writings about Latin America, Jesuit accounts

were later scorned for their embrace of the marvellous. As a result, they were

implicated in what has been labelled the querelle d’Amérique, or the “Dispute of

the New World,” which informed attitudes to Latin America in science and

9

philosophy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.24 Thinkers such as

Hegel propagated the idea that the natural features of the Americas displayed

a “physical immaturity” and were “not only relatively new, but intrinsically so

in respect of their entire physical and psychical constitution.”25 Responding to

this intellectual context, the most important subsequent appearance of los

Saltos del Guairá in writing comes from Spanish naturalist Félix de Azara

(1746-1821), who surveyed the territory of Río de la Plata following the

Treaty of San Ildefonso (1777), which established the new limits of Spanish

and Portuguese possessions in the region following the expulsion of the

Jesuits in 1767.

Frequently drawn on by later travel writers, Azara wrote in conscious

opposition to de Buffon, de Pauw, and Linnaeus, who had denigrated the

flora, fauna and landscape of Latin America as geologically immature. As an

obvious site for establishing the claims of South American geography, Azara

offered detailed evidence of the form and power of the falls to counter

accusations of Jesuit marvel-spinning and simultaneously to position Latin

American nature as equal if not greater than that of Europe. Presenting a

descriptive overview of the structure of the falls, Azara wrote that “The

Guayra Falls . . . lie not far from the Tropic of Capricorn at latitude 24˚ 4’

27’’, following observations. It is a frightful cataract worthy of description by

poets.”26 Elsewhere in Azara’s accounts, the falls were equated with classical

European landscapes, becoming “worthy of description by Virgil and

Homer.”27 In effect, Azara writes in terms later familiar through the work of

Alexander von Humboldt, offering a scientific underpinning to a still

10

“dramatic, extraordinary nature, a spectacle capable of overwhelming human

knowledge and understanding.”28

Azara’s testimony stood as authoritative throughout the nineteenth

century for want of more substantiated evidence, but explorers, geographers

and scientists still attested to the semi-legendary nature of the falls resulting

from the dearth of descriptions and their continued remoteness. In The

Hydraulics of Great Rivers: The Paraná, the Uruguay and the La Plata Estuary (1874),

English engineer J. J. Révy surveyed earlier Jesuit accounts alongside the

writings of Azara, outlining the need for further information on a place that

still existed stubbornly between fact and fiction, observing that the only

ascertainable fact was “that a prodigious Fall, involving the concussion of

immense masses of water, exists in the Central South American continent on

the Parana, the largest river in the world, except, perhaps, the Amazon.”29

Subsequent accounts by nineteenth-century travellers, while shaped by

the scientific positivism of the age, nevertheless compounded the uncertainty,

with most characterized by a lingering determination to transmit an aesthetic

of the sublime in registering the sight, and especially the sound, of the falls.

Manuel de San Martín’s Un Viaje al Salto Guayra (Asunción, 1897) stated that

neither the Jesuits nor Azara had done justice to the tremendous nature of

the place: “I don’t think that anywhere quite like Guayra exists on earth,”

while also seeking to offer a contemporary account of a place laden with

“semi-mythological notions, lost in the mists of time.” 30

This aspect of the falls, their fame but simultaneous obscurity, was

recorded in The Geographical Journal in 1911, which received correspondence

from a traveller to “the famous Guayra falls on the upper Parana river, which,

11

though long known . . . have not yet been seen by any large number of

Europeans, and, so far as we are aware, have not hither to been the subject of

a first-hand description by an English traveller.”31 Similarly, in 1908 the Buenos

Aires Herald had asserted that “it was not possible to ascertain the name of

more than 18 Europeans who had visited the falls.”32 Among documented

accounts, the most detailed work in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth

centuries came in Emmanuel de Bourgade la Dardye’s La Paraguay (Paris,

1889), and from Serbian explorers, brothers Mirko and Stevo Seljan, whose

richly illustrated El Salto del Guayra/La Chute du Guayra (Buenos Aires, 1905)

sought to document the site photographically and to imbue the falls with an

aura of classical grandeur. An additional feature of these writings was the

endeavour to see both Iguazu and los Saltos del Guairá in one journey, given

their geographical proximity, with Jose Rodriguez’s A Traves del Iguazu y del

Guayra (1917) and Julio Nogueira’s Do Rio ao Igaassú e ao Guayra (Rio de

Janeiro, 1920) elaborating on the additional hardships of reaching the latter

on a journey through the wilderness of Western Brazil and Eastern Paraguay.

Modern Travellers, Tourism, and Hydroelectric Power

Following the end of the War of the Triple Alliance in 1870, which saw

Paraguay lose eastern territory to Argentina and Brazil, the country

experienced a period of sustained economic liberalism.33 Large tracts of

Eastern Paraguay, devoted to the yerba mate trade, were purchased by

companies such as the Anglo-Argentine Industrial Paraguaya, and Paraguay

sought to attract foreign capital and promote its potential at events such as

the 1897 World’s Fair in Brussels.34 Foreign speculators surveyed a country

still shrouded in enigma, and as accounts of the falls appeared in geographical

12

and economic publications in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, an emerging characteristic was analysis of the possibility for tourist

development and technological transformation.

Employing a style found frequently in British writing about Argentina in

the same period, Alexander Baillie’s A Paraguayan Treasure (1887) offered a

combination of adventure novel and emigration handbook, focusing on

economic opportunities in Paraguay under the guise of a search for the

putative buried treasure of recently-deposed dictator Francisco Solano López.

In case of uncertainty, the novel confirmed Paraguay’s geographical location,

but also its new connection to the global economy, clarifying that the country

lay “in South America, about thirty days from home, and in easy

communication by post and telegraph.”35 Exploring the dramatic potential of

the falls in ways that looked to both their legendary past and their future

development, the narrative drew upon the language of Jesuit accounts, noting

that “at thirty miles from the Falls of Guayra, a noise is heard like thunder;

[so] that settlements had to be abandoned because the inhabitants became

deaf.”36 The culmination of the plot sees the treasure of the title end up at the

bottom of the falls, presently lost to history. However, Baillie’s work is

sufficiently a product of the era of the Suez and Panama canals to envisage a

moment inconceivable to earlier writers, in which the Paraná and the falls

become governable, with “the treasure itself, never again to appear until some

gigantic force of Nature lays bare the bed of the river, or some unexampled

feat of engineering, diverts the course of the Alto Parana.”37 This potential to

imagine the altering of the hitherto immutable also appears in Victorino

Abente’s poem “Salto Guairá” (1899). While evoking the sublimity of the

13

movement of the falls, the Spanish-Paraguayan poet also dwells on futurity,

displaying a portentous uncertainty before the idea of unchanging nature:

“Will your career, tumultuous and proud, end one day? Or will the ceaseless

movement of your wrathful, roaring waters last as long as the world?”38

Surveying the role of los Saltos del Guairá in Paraguayan history, Efraím

Cardozo observed that “The economic and technological revolution

occurring elsewhere in the world that sought to capture the power of great

waterfalls did not go unnoticed in Paraguay. At the same time as the United

States undertook work at Niagara, in our country the first expeditions and

investigations took place to gauge the power of los Saltos del Guairá with a

view to its later use.”39 The spectre of Niagara Falls represents a key context

for reading the transformations which later occurred at los Saltos del Guairá.

The nineteenth century saw the coming to Niagara of projects such as

Roebling’s Suspension Bridge, burgeoning mass tourism, and hydroelectric

power stations. In 1897, the Literary Digest registered such concerns in an

article entitled “Is Niagara Doomed?” and this unease spoke to

contemporaries concerned with the development of the world’s other famous

cataracts.40 In her analysis of modern cultural and economic history of

Victoria Falls, JoAnn McGregor has observed how frequently “Niagara’s

precedent was invoked” in “struggles over the physical and symbolic

landscape of the Falls as it was turned into a tourist resort.”41 Initially taking

the form of optimistic expectations of “urban and industrial developments”

near Victoria Falls, connected to tourism and hydropower, this transformed

into “debates over conservation” in light of the view that “new industrial

prosperity in Niagara had spoilt its aesthetic appeal.”42 Niagara’s shadow can

14

be traced in writings about los Saltos del Guairá from the turn of the

twentieth century, as tourist and hydroelectric potential saw the distinctive

roar of the waters elicit a new range of responses increasingly removed from

the awe-struck immobility of earlier travellers. As Walter D. Mignolo has

observed, “If, in the sixteenth century, ‘nature’ was conceived in terms of

lands and territories to be mapped or as the spectacle of the world through

which its Maker could be known, from the beginning of the nineteenth

century ‘nature’ became the fuel, the raw material, for the Industrial

Revolution and the forward-moving engine of progress and capital

accumulation.”43

In Alexander K. MacDonald’s Picturesque Paraguay (1911), the author

assessed the lack of infrastructural development at the falls. Highlighting the

time, difficulty and stamina needed to reach the site, MacDonald envisaged

appropriate future intervention: “Some day an enormous population will

develop the hidden wealth of this region. Indeed, the Falls alone might

provide sufficient electrical power for the whole Republic. What has been

already done in North America will be done in the future in the South of the

continent.”44 In evidence here is what Mary Louise Pratt terms an “explicit

interaction between esthetics and ideology,” in which “the esthetic qualities

of the landscape constitute the social and material value of the discovery to

the explorers’ home culture, at the same time as its esthetic deficiencies

suggest a need for social and material intervention.”45 Manuel de San Martín’s

Un Viaje al Salto Guayrá (1897) was also optimistic regarding development,

outlining of how the falls would meet the future: “Tourists will then come in

their thousands to visit the great falls, as they now go to visit Niagara, the

15

falls of the Rhine, the falls of Gavernie, and many others, all of which are of

much less interest than Guayra.”46 Contrary to such expectant visions, in

1922, in The Golden River: Sport and Travel in Paraguay, J. W. Hills and Ianthe

Dunbar saw the growth of international tourism and hydroelectric power as a

threat to the historical and natural continuity of the falls, tarnishing the

landscape and diminishing the experience of the intrepid traveller. “Such are

the Falls, untouched by man. Untouched, however, they will not long remain

. . . before long Messrs. Cook . . . will run you out from London, three days at

the Falls, at an inclusive charge there and back, English spoken all the way,

and first-class accommodation in steamer, train and hotel.” Envisaging an

emerging world of pampered international globetrotters, future tourists

would “see what we saw, but it shall be tamed [. . .] and you shall mark with

approval how all this force has been harnessed for the service of man, and no

longer allowed to run to waste, in Nature’s foolish fashion.”47

Contemporary with the work of such writers, developments were

occurring to ensure that neither possibility sketched above would be realized.

Between the vision of improvement outlined by MacDonald in 1911 and the

spoliation of the hordes dreaded by Hills and Dunbar in 1922, los Saltos del

Guairá would instead experience modernity as death by water, as preliminary

excursions to investigate hydroelectric potential took place at the turn of the

twentieth century. Pietro Antonelli’s Salto Guaira (Buenos Aires, 1896) sought

to gauge the rate of flow of the waters, but resorted to a familiar rhetoric of

wonder in which the traveller “seems to be in another world” in the presence

of an “incomparable embodiment of nature.”48 Following articles by Carlos

Frutos on “Energías del Salto del Guairá” published in Asunción’s El Diario

16

on 28 and 30 January 1915, the first full report into the possibility of

hydroelectric development at los Saltos del Guairá featured in Mario

Mariotti’s Posibilidades del Desarollo de la industria hidro-eléctrica en el Paraguay

(1925). Mariotti, an Italian engineer employed with La Industrial Paraguaya,

asserted that “the energy that can be supplied by the rapids and torrents of

the headwaters of los Saltos del Guairá is indeed considerable.”49 Signalling

their importance to Paraguay’s territorial identity and economic future, the

falls featured on the Paraguayan 100 peso banknote in 1925, while R. B.

Cunninghame Graham, a longstanding sceptical observer of modernity and

progress, added a footnote to a new edition of A Vanished Arcadia in 1924,

remarking that the great forgotten cataract on the Paraná had unquestionably,

and “unfortunately,” been “rediscovered.”50

Itaipú and the End of Los Saltos del Guairá

[I]t has been proved that there can be no question of any major hydroelectric

development at Guayra for many years to come.51

The Geographical Journal (March 1932)

Paraguay’s modern association with the economic potential of los Saltos del

Guairá, as represented by their appearance in publications such as the

government-sponsored Antología Gráfica del Paraguay (1911), reached its

apogee during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-89), who, as

Christine Folch has observed, “staked his regime’s claims to modernity and

legitimacy on a gargantuan hydroelectric project, Itaipú Dam.”52 Stroessner’s

personalist rule drew strongly upon the legacy of Paraguay’s authoritarian

past, but, importantly, it also saw the country’s progress become irrevocably

17

“intertwined with its foreign relations.”53 Dominated by the shadow of what

Raúl Zibechi has termed Brazil’s “regional imperialism,” Paraguay’s links to

its eastern neighbour were characterized by an unequal economic partnership

that pulled Paraguay into the channels carved by Brazil’s economic

advancement. Brazil’s flexing of its economic muscle was driven by the

pursuit of projects designed to “transfer nature into exchange values,” with

these years seeing the development of hydroelectric stations at Paulo Affonso

on the Rio São Francisco and the construction of ambitious projects such as

the Trans-Amazonian Highway.54

Following Paraguayan investigations into the hydroelectric potential of

los Saltos del Guairá, Brazilian studies gathered pace in the 1950s and 1960s,

and following the military coup in 1964, which saw the overthrow of

President João Goulart, Brazil “employed military force in occupying the land

adjacent to the falls, and adopted an obdurate position in an exchange of

diplomatic notes over the ownership question.”55 The disputed ownership

dated to the end of the War of the Triple Alliance, which saw the signing of

the Loizaga-Cotegipe Treaty between Brazil and Paraguay in 1872, leaving the

exact position of the border contested. While a goods railway controlled by

the Companhia Matte Larangeira skirted the falls in the early years of the

century between Guaíra and Porto Mendes to facilitate the yerba mate trade on

unnavigable sections of the Paraná, major Brazilian interest in the falls was

contemporaneous with its push for economic supremacy begun during the

nineteen thirties and forties under the rule of Getúlio Vargas. Preliminary

plans had investigated hydroelectric options that excluded Paraguayan

involvement, as outlined in Octávio Marcondes Ferraz’s Aproveitamento do

18

Potencial do salto de sete quedas (Rio Paraná) (1953), while also envisaging a

project which would have preserved the falls.56 This, however, was forsaken

in favour of bringing Paraguay within Brazil’s sphere of influence through

dominance of the bi-national project of the Itaipú dam.57 Resolution of the

border dispute came with the Act of Yguazu (1966), which agreed plans for

bi-national cooperation, while the Treaty of Itaipú (1973), signed by

Stroessner and the Brazilian military leader Emílio Garrastazu Médici,

approved construction of a mega-dam 170 kilometres south of the falls.

Annex B to the treaty announced that the embalse (reservoir) of Itaipú dam

would “inundate an area approximately 1,400 km2 in Paraguay and 800 km2 in

Brazil, and will extend upriver a distance of around 200 kilometres, up to and

including the Guayra Falls or Sete Quedas.”58 The full environmental impact,

however, remained obscure in a climate of censorship in both countries.

The increasingly cordial, if unequal political relations between the two

countries saw the removal of restrictions on Brazilian immigration to Eastern

Paraguay and the rapid transformation of the long-remote region for

agricultural production, a process involving the resettlement of indigenous

communities and human rights violations inflicted on the Aché people.59

With the sudden economic transformation of Eastern Paraguay and Western

Brazil the longstanding isolation of the falls came to an abrupt end. Travelling

in the Brazilian state of Paraná in the 1930s, Claude Lévi-Strauss could still

observe a “virgin and solemn landscape which seems to have preserved the

aspect of the carboniferous era intact over millions of centuries,” but this

remote landscape was soon to join the lost worlds evoked elsewhere in Tristes

Tropiques (1955).60 With an eye to both short-term tourist potential and future

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hydroelectric exploitation, Brazil designated the area around the falls a

national park under the presidency of Jânio Quadros in May 1961, with Sete

Quedas one of eleven Brazilian national parks established between 1959 and

1961.61 In 1965, at the height of the confrontation with Paraguay over the

falls, a road was constructed though the jungle from the falls to Porto

Renato.62 With US financial assistance Paraguay built a road from Colonel

Oviedo in central Paraguay to the small hamlet of Saltos del Guairá in 1966.63

A growing influx of Brazilian migrants into Eastern Paraguay and the sudden

available access to the falls now designated the site a potential tourist

attraction for the remaining years of its existence.

The changes in infrastructure can be instructively traced through the

best-selling South American Handbook. Not featuring in the guidebook between

its first publication in 1924 and 1951, in 1952 the falls suddenly emerged

from their historical remoteness when listed as “pre-eminent amongst the

many tourist attractions of South America.”64 The 1953 edition introduced

information that remained unchanged until 1965, recommending a 27-hour

rail journey from São Paulo to Porto Tibiriça, followed by a two-day “rough

and romantic river voyage through tropical forest” downstream to reach the

falls, admitting that “land and river trips are an excellent way of seeing the

country, but they require a certain amount of stamina.”65 In his account of

the life and culture of Paraguay in the mid-twentieth century, The River and the

People (1965), Gordon Meyer captured the longstanding resistance to

modernity of los Saltos del Guairá at the moment of their impending demise.

Asking a Paraguayan acquaintance “What’s at Guairá besides the cataracts?”

Meyer learns: “Nothing . . . different from Iguazú . . . lonely; no visitors go

20

there. It’s something to see.” The spectacle of the falls, Meyer observed with

wonder and some alarm, offered the sight of “A giant river . . . a cosmic force

fighting the control under which it has suddenly been pushed.”66

In 1975, however, travel advice in the South American Handbook now

listed recently-developed roads and bus services in the western Brazilian state

of Paraná, whereas by 1982 an expanded range of travel options and many

further hotels were listed. Accompanying these from 1979 was new

information about the Itaipú project and the fact that shortly “Sete Quedas

will cease to exist.”67 The fate of the falls was publically known from the late

seventies, with publications surveying Brazil’s national parks, such as Os

Parques Nacionais do Brasil (1979), and works such as Henri Pitaud’s Las Seite

Caidas del Rio Paraná (1978), announcing their imminent inundation. The

aesthetic allure of the falls and knowledge of their approaching disappearance

saw visitor numbers increase. According to one study, the site received “as

many as 160,000 tourists in 1980.”68 The increased traffic to obtain views of

the falls, afforded through a series of bridges spanning the channels of the

cataract, resulted in tragedy on 17 January 1982, when a bridge on the

Brazilian side collapsed, causing the death of thirty-two tourists, an event that

garnered considerable media coverage in both Paraguay and Brazil and which

has continued to occupy a place in Brazilian national memory.69

In late 1982, after almost a decade of highly-publicized engineering feats,

including the rerouting of the Paraná in 1978 to allow for the construction of

Itaipú, on 13 October the reservoir behind the main dam began to fill. The

ultimate drowning of the falls was recorded by Paraguayan and Brazilian

media, as pictures of the slowly-disappearing site appeared in editorials. On

21

15 October, Ultima Hora announced that the Itaipú reservoir was filling at a

rate of 1.2 metres per hour.70 On 21 October, Hoy announced that “Los

Saltos del Guairá are disappearing faster than expected.”71 A dramatic

photographic valedictory was published in ABC Color on 20 October 1982

(Fig. 4), which announced “Farewell to Our Country’s Greatest Natural

Treasure.” Featuring a dramatic aerial shot of the almost-submerged falls, the

accompanying text announced “one of the last views of this natural wonder,

slowly dying to give birth to another artificial wonder: Itaipú.”72 In contrast to

Paraguayan publications at the time of the accords with Brazil in the 1960s,

such as Marco Antonio Laconich’s La Cuestion de Limites en el Salto del Guairá

(1964), and Efraím Cardozo’s Los Derechos del Paraguay sobre los Saltos del Guairá

(1965) and Los Saltos del Guairá en la Historia (1966), which had claimed the

falls as historically integral to Paraguayan identity, contemporary coverage

invariably presented their loss as the necessary price of modernisation, with

the dam cast as the phoenix rising from the ashes of the natural sacrifice. An

editorial by Ilde Silvero, in ABC Revista on 24 October 1982, entitled “Life

Before Beauty,” captured the irreconcilable antagonisms of “delicate

decisions” in the nation’s history, but stressed the need for “material well-

being ahead of poetry,” insisting that a natural wonder would make way for

an artificial one in the interests of bi-national cooperation.73

Owing to the authoritarianism and surveillance of the Stroessner era,

opposition to the project in environmental terms proved difficult to voice

within Paraguay, with dissent instead centred on the terms of the Itaipú

Treaty as a way of challenging the Stroessner regime.74 Earlier, on 23 January

1982, journalist Andrés Colmán Gutiérrez had published an article entitled

22

“The Environment and Dams: Los Saltos del Guairá Will Die in October” in

Ultima Hora, scrutinizing the uncertain ecological consequences of Itaipú, but

skeptical responses were lost amidst a mass of information on the productive

potential of the dam and Paraguay’s role in the construction of an

engineering marvel.75 In Brazil, protest proved more forthcoming. By the

early 1980s the authoritarian excesses of the military era in Brazil gave way to

the more open politics of the leadership of its final president, João

Figueiredo. The effects of the dam, including the flooding of 1,350 square

kilometres, the relocation of 42,444 people, and the inundation of the falls,

mobilized protest that, while facing the ineluctable economic rational of the

project led by the military government in the 1970s, has since been credited

with initiating contemporary political movements opposed to the

environmental consequences of Brazil’s hydroelectric ambitions.76

At the time, however, as Ana Dos Santos has noted, “the arguments of

engineers and politicians overrode all obstacles to the building of the plant.

Opposition to its realization was interpreted as opposition to the nation itself.

To invest against Itaipú was to be contrary to the long-sought development

of the Brazilian nation.”77 Brazilian justifications for the decision to submerge

the falls echoed those in Paraguay, with additional arguments asserting that

the site could be sacrificed in light of both Brazil’s possession of the global

attraction of Iguazu and the role the loss would play in fostering economic

union with Paraguay. According to General José Costa Cavalcanti, the first

director-general of Itaipú Binacional, Sete Quedas produced “little more than

rudimentary tourism, and nothing at all like Iguazu Falls. And now, that

natural resource, which yields little . . . can be allowed to give an enormous

23

income to the owners of the Sete Quedas, namely Brazil and Paraguay.”78

The Sete Quedas National Park was liquidated by presidential decree in July

1981, amongst protests from Brazilian ecologists.79 In advance of the

formation of the Itaipú reservoir, a Quarup, an indigenous lamentation

festival, was staged from 23-25 July 1982 for the destruction of the falls.

Attended by 3,000 Brazilian ecologists, 30,000 tourists and 7,000 residents of

the nearby town of Guaíra, this took place in the context of a larger Brazil-

wide “Adeus a Sete Quedas,” which helped contribute to the later emergence

of social justice movements for farmers affected by the consequences of

Itaipú.80 In a published statement, the Quarup drew attention to the secrecy

of the development of the Itaipú project during the Medici government of

the early 1970s, decrying the lack of transparency in decisions taken to

approve the dam and the lost opportunities for developing a project that

might have simultaneously preserved the falls.

With a continued ecological presence at the falls and ongoing silent

protests, on 9 September 1982, the Jornal do Brasil published a poem entitled

“Adeus a Sete Quedas” by Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade,

which evoked the wondering gaze of those who had seen the falls across the

centuries, while looking on aghast at the finality of the form of their death.81

A month later, on 10 October 1982, before the filling of the reservoir,

Drummond’s article “Sete Quedas Might Have Been Saved,” published in the

Jornal do Brasil, relayed correspondence from engineer Octávio Marcondes

Ferraz recalling the first Brazilian plans to harness the falls with a project that

preserved the cataract, as put forward in Ferraz’s 1953 report Aproveitamento

do Potencial do Salto de Sete Quedas.82 Contrasting the former onslaught of the

24

waters of the falls with the onslaught of economic priorities, the article

evoked frustrated helplessness and melancholy regret.

Contemporary and later Paraguayan attitudes to the loss of the falls

emphasized the aesthetic compensation to be found in the sublime

technological achievement of the dam, which would eclipse the falls in

splendour, with additional justifications linked to the role of Itaipú in ending

the border dispute with Brazil. The 1998 Enciclopedia Geographica del Paraguay

classified the dam as an “ecological crime as a solution to border conflict.”83

The longstanding importance of los Saltos del Guairá to Paraguay’s territorial

identity shifted to the importance of Itaipú to its economic modernisation.

Continuing up to the present day, the narrative of Paraguayan modernity and

territorial sovereignty has remained bound to the Itaipú Dam. Figures such as

engineer and political activist Ricardo Canese have published numerous

works on the subject, dealing with the economic terms imposed on Paraguay

as the price for participation in the project.84 As such, it illustrates the

contemporary role of hydroelectric power in “the formulation of a new

notion of sovereignty” to replace that historically expressed through the

geography of the falls.85 In interviews on los Saltos del Guairá conducted in

Paraguay in 2014 and 2016 for this research, many interviewees afforded the

loss of the falls regret before swiftly turning to the treaty rights agreed

between Paraguay and Brazil over the sale of surplus electricity from Itaipú.

For others who had visited in the 1970s, there remained the memory of an

indelible encounter with nature, and subsequent reflection on an ecological

wound, with the falls a casualty of an era in which Paraguay lacked an

ecologically minded class and a political climate in which to express

25

environmental opposition to Itaipú. In the town of Saltos del Guairá, which

contains an underwhelming monument to the former splendour of the falls

(Fig. 5), the loss is felt more acutely, and the Municipalidad currently seeks

compensation in perpetuity from the Paraguayan state for the loss of the falls.

In Guaíra, in Brazil, in the poems and songs of local poets and musicians,

such as Edson Galvão, the falls are celebrated and mourned in acts of poetic

and musical remembrance.

At Itaipú today, no information on los Saltos del Guairá is available.

Alongside Paraguayan and Brazilian promotion of the dam as a symbol of

economic modernity, the relatively obscured history of los Saltos del Guairá

can be attributed, ironically, to another set of famous waterfalls, the world-

renowned Iguazu Falls, which received UNESCO World Heritage status in

1984, two years after the disappearance of Sete Quedas. In correspondence

from Brazil and Paraguay in the UNESCO archives in Paris from the 1970s

and 1980s, amongst applications for the protected heritage status of Iguazu

no reference to los Saltos del Guairá can be found. As early as 1932, W. S.

Barclay, writing in the Geographical Journal, observed that “The Iguazu Falls

have by now been so often described that one hesitates to add further

impressions,” and in 1934 the Argentine government designated the area

around Iguazu Falls a protected national park, followed by a Brazilian

national park in 1939.86 Owing to such long-standing fame, later consolidated

by their role in The Mission (1986), as well in their appearance in blockbusters

such as Moonraker (1979) and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

(2008) Iguazu Falls emerged in the international consciousness as the

emblematic Great Falls of South America, promoted as a destination

26

embodying nature’s power and beauty, just as Machu Picchu in Peru stood

for the continent’s sophisticated pre-Colombian civilization. However, the

prominence of Iguazu has ensured that the original Great Falls of South

America, those in actuality bound up with the history of the Jesuits in

Paraguay, and regarded for centuries as the supreme natural wonder of the

continent, lie submerged in the historical record just as they lie drowned by

the modernity that saw their end at the close of the twentieth century.

1 “The Waterfall of Guayra,” Manchester Courier, 25 April 1876, 3. 2 Phillip Glass, Itaipú (1989); National Geographic - Megastructures: Itaipú Dam (2009). 3 Christine Folch, “Surveillance and State Violence in Stroessner’s Paraguay: Itaipú Hydroelectric Dam, Archive of Terror,” American Anthropologist 115 (2013): 44–57; and Christine Folch, “The Cause of All Paraguayans?: Defining and Defending Hydroelectric Sovereignty,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 20 (2015): 242–63. 4 Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams (London: Zed Books, 1996), 33. 5 See Daniella Feteira Soares, Paisagem e memória: dos Saltos de Sete Quedas ao lago de Itaipú. Dissertação de Mestrado (Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ/ IPPUR, 2001); Guiomar Inez Germani, Expropriados. Terra e água: o conflito de Itaipu (Salvador: Edufba: Ulbra, 2003); Ana Paula dos Santos, Lago de Memórias: a submersão das Sete Quedas. Dissertação apresentada ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em História (Mestrado) da Universidade Estadual de Maringá, (Maringá, 2006); E. B. C. Souza, “Contextualização política da construção da Barragem de Itaipú,” Perspectiva Geográfica 1 (2005): 25-47; and J. F. M Silva and E. B. C. Souza, “A (re)organização do espaço em Guaíra após o fim das Sete Quedas,” Revista Ra´e Ga: O Espaço Geográfico em Análise 14 (2007): 85-95. 6 Shawn William Miller, An Environmental History of Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5. 7 Ted Steinberg, Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), xviii. 8 Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, translated by Patrick Camiller (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 652. 9 McCully, Silenced Rivers, 33. 10 Edward C. Rashleigh, Among the Waterfalls of the World (London: Jarrolds, 1935), 21, 30. 11 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 204. 12 R. B. Cunninghame Graham, A Vanished Arcadia: Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay 1607 to 1767 (London: Heinemann, 1901), 74. 13 Cunninghame Graham, A Vanished Arcadia, 77. 14 Martín del Barco Centenera, Argentina y conquista del Río de la Plata, con otros acaecimientos de los reinos

del Perú, Tucumán y estado del Brasil (Lisbon, 1602), 13. All translations from Spanish, Portuguese and French are my own throughout unless otherwise noted. 15 Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, Historia Argentina del descubrimiento, población y conquista del Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires, 1854 [1612]), 15. 16 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 73, 14. 17 Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, Historia Argentina, 15-16. 18 Nicholas del Techo, History of the Provinces of Paraguay, Tucuman, Rio de La Plata, Parana, Guaira, and Urvaica, And Something of the Kingdom of Chili in South America (1704 [1673]), 742. 19 Pierre Berton, Niagara: A History of the Falls (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 31.

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20 Miguel de Asúa, Science in the Vanished Arcadia: Knowledge of Nature in the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and Río de la Plata (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2014), 43. 21 George O’Neill, Golden Years on the Paraguay: A History of the Jesuit Missions from 1600 to 1767 (London: Burns, Oates & Co, 1934), 83-84. See also, Barbara Ganson, The Guaraní Under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 22 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual hecha por los religiosos de la Compañía de Jesús en las provincias del Paraguay, Paraná, Uruguay y Tape (Madrid, 1639), 6. 23 Efraím Cardozo, Los Saltos del Guaira en la Historia. Separata de la Revista Dimension (Asuncion, 1966), 2. 24 See Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900, translated by Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973). 25 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991), 81. 26 Félix de Azara, Voyages dans l’Amérique méridionale, Vol. 1 (Paris, 1809), 70-71. 27 Félix de Azara, Descripción é historia del Paraguay y del Río de la Plata, Vol. 1 (Madrid, 1847), 39. 28 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 120. 29 J. J. Révy, The Hydraulics of Great Rivers: The Paraná, the Uruguay and the La Plata Estuary (London, 1874), 108. 30 Manuel de San Martín, Un Viaje al Salto Guayra (Asunción, 1897), 27, 28. 31 “The Monthly Record,” Geographical Journal 37 (May 1911): 565. 32 Angelo de Rin, “The Guayra Falls: Account of a Recent Visit to this Wonderful Rival to Niagara,” Buenos Aires Herald (27 September 1908), 7. 33 See Harris Gaylord Warren, Rebirth of the Paraguayan Republic: The First Colorado Era, 1878-1904 (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). 34 Paul H. Lewis, Political Parties and Generations in Paraguay’s Liberal Era 1869-1940 (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 82. 35 Alexander F. Baillie, A Paraguayan Treasure: The Search and the Discovery (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1887), 39. 36 Baillie, Paraguayan Treasure, 345-46. 37 Baillie, Paraguayan Treasure, 367. 38 Victorino Abente, “Salto Guairá” [1899], in José Rodriguez Alcalá ed., Antolojía Paraguaya (Asunción, 1911), 14. 39 Cardozo, Los Saltos del Guairá en la Historia, 138. 40 “Is Niagara Doomed?” Literary Digest 15 (2 October 1897): 614. 41 JoAnn McGregor, “The Victoria Falls 1900-1940: Landscape, Tourism and the Geographical Imagination,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29:3 (2003): 719. 42 McGregor, “The Victoria Falls 1900-1940,” 726. 43 Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 82. 44 Alexander K. MacDonald, Picturesque Paraguay: Sport, Pioneering, Travel, A Land of Promise, Stock-Raising, Plantation, Industries, Forest Products, Commercial Possibilities (London: Charles Kelly, 1911), 319. 45 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 205. 46 Manuel de San Martín, Un Viaje al Salto Guayrá (Asunción, 1897), 33. 47 J. W. Hills and Ianthe Dunbar, The Golden River: Sport and Travel in Paraguay (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1922), 79-80. 48 Pietro Antonelli’s Salto Guairá (Buenos Aires, 1896), 23, 24. 49 Mario Mariotti, Posibilidades del Desarollo de la industria hidro-eléctrica en el Paraguay (Asuncíon, 1925), 5. 50 Cunninghame Graham, A Vanished Arcadia (London: Heinemann, 1924), 78. 51 W. S. Barclay, “The Basin of the River Parana (Continued),” The Geographical Journal 79 (March 1932): 192. 52 Folch, “Surveillance and State Violence in Stroessner’s Paraguay,” 44. 53 Paul H. Lewis, Paraguay Under Stroessner (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 161. 54 Raúl Zibechi, The New Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy, translated by Ramor Ryan (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2014), 181. See also, Peter Lambert, “The Myth of the Good Neighbour: Paraguay’s Uneasy Relationship with Brazil,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 35 (January 2016): 34-48. 55 R. Andrew Nickson, Historical Dictionary of Paraguay, Third Edition (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 283. 56 Octávio Marcondes Ferraz, Aproveitamento do Potencial do salto de sete quedas (Rio Paraná) (São Paulo: Federaçao e Centro das industrias do Estado, 1953).

28

57 See Osny D. Pereira, Itaipu prós e contras – ensaio sobre a localização, no Brasil, da maior barragem do mundo e sua implicações em nossa política continental. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1974. 58 Efraín Enríquez Gamón, Itaipú: Aguas que valen oro, Segunda Edición (Asunción: ABC Color, 2007), 65. This volume offers a comprehensive compilation of documents relating to the central political, legal and economic debates concerning the Itaipú treaty from Paraguay and Brazil in the 1970s. 59 R. Andrew Nickson, “Brazilian Colonization of the Eastern Border Region of Paraguay,” Journal of Latin American Studies 13 (May 1981): 111-31. See also, Mark Munzel, The Aché Indians: Genocide in Paraguay ([S.l.]: Iwgia, DK, 1973); Richard Arens ed., Genocide in Paraguay (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976); Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado, Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1996); and René Harder Horst, The Stroessner Regime and Indigenous Resistance in Paraguay (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007). 60 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, translated by John Weightmann and Doreen Weightmann (London: Penguin, 2011), 153. 61 José Luiz de Andrade Franco and José Augusto Drummond, “Nature Protection: The FBCN and Conservation Initiatives in Brazil, 1958-1992,” Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña 2 (2013): 338-67. See also, Daniel H. Stillwell, “National Parks of Brazil: A Study in Recreational Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 53 (September 1963): 391-406. 62 R. Andrew Nickson, “The Itaipú Hydro-Electric Project: The Paraguayan Perspective,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 2 (October 1982): 1-20. 63 For a full treatment of US-Paraguay relations, see Frank O. Mora and Jerry W. Cooney, Paraguay and the United States: Distant Allies (London: University of Georgia Press, 2007). 64 The South American Handbook (Bath: Trade and Travel Publications Limited, 1952), 374. 65 The South American Handbook (1965), 573. 66 Gordon Meyer, The River and the People (London: Methuen, 1965), 124, 129. 67 The South American Handbook (1979), 271. 68 Gerd Kohlhepp, Itaipú: Basic Geopolitical and Energy Situation – Socio-Economic and Ecological Consequences of the Itaipú Dam and Reservoir on the Río Paraná (Brazil/Paraguay) (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg, 1987), 78. 69 Jornal do Brasil (18 January 1982), 1, 14; ABC Color (18 January 1982), 1, 13; Ultima Hora (18 January 1982), 30; ABC Color (19 January 1982), 1, 8. 70 Ultima Hora (15 October 1982), 1. 71 Hoy (21 October 1982), 12. 72 ABC Color (20 October 1982), 1. 73 ABC Revista (24 October 1982), 12. 74 See Folch, “The Cause of All Paraguayans?: Defining and Defending Hydroelectric Sovereignty,” 250-51. 75 Ultima Hora (23 January 1982), 8-9. 76 Carlos B. Vainer, “Water for Life, Not for Death: The Brazilian Social Movement of People Affected by Dams,” in Carmen Diana Deere and Frederick S. Royce ed., Rural Social Movements in Latin America: Organizing for Sustainable Livelihoods (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 185. 77 Dos Santos, Lago de Memórias: a submersão das Sete Quedas, 45. 78 Dos Santos, Lago de Memórias: a submersão das Sete Quedas, 47. 79 Dos Santos, Lago de Memórias: a submersão das Sete Quedas, 90. 80 Dos Santos, Lago de Memórias: a submersão das Sete Quedas, 80. See Germani, Expropriados. Terra e água: o conflito de Itaipu. 81 Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “Adeus a Sete Quedas,” Jornal do Brasil, Caderno B (9 September 1982), 8. 82 Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “Sete Quedas poderia ser salva,” Jornal do Brasil, Caderno B, (10 October 1982), 6. 83 Enciclopedia Geographica del Paraguay (Asunción: La Nación, 1998), 338. 84 See, for instance, Ricardo Canese, La deuda ilicita de Itaipu: el mas nefasto negociado contra el Paraguay (Asuncion: Editorial Generacion, 1999); and La recuperación de la soberanía hidroeléctrica del Paraguay. En el marco de Políticas de Estado de energía. (Asuncion: Editorial “El ombligo del mundo,” 2007). 85 Folch, “The Cause of All Paraguayans? Defining and Defending Hydroelectric Sovereignty,” 245. 86 Barclay, “Basin of the River Parana,” 187. For detailed information on the establishment of the park in Brazil, see Frederico Freitas, “A Park for the Borderlands: The Creation of the Iguaçu National Park in Southern Brazil, 1880-1940,” HIb: Revista de Historia Iberoamericana 7.2 (2014): 65–88.